Boris Akunin - Murder on the Leviathan

As he picked up the second sheet of paper, Gauche warned his listeners:

‘This is the point where it starts to get interesting.’

I had been taught Arabic as a child, but my tutors were too indulgent with the heir apparent and I did not learn much.

Later, when my mother and I were in France, the lessons stopped altogether and I rapidly forgot the little that I knew.

For many years the Koran with my father’s notes in it seemed to me like an enchanted book written in a magical script that no mere mortal could ever decipher. How glad I was later that I never asked anyone who knew Arabic to read the jottings in the margins! I had decided that I must fathom this mystery for myself, no matter what it cost me. I took up Arabic again while I was sailing to Maghrib and the Levant, and gradually the Koran began speaking to me in my father’s voice. But many years went by before the handwritten notes - ornate aphorisms by Eastern sages, extracts from poems and worldly advice from a loving father to his son - began hinting to me that they made up a kind of code. If the notes were read in a certain order, they acquired the sense of precise and detailed instructions, but that could only be understood by someone who had committed the notes to memory and engraved them on his heart. I struggled longest of all with a line from a poem that I did not know:

One year ago, as I was reading the memoirs of a certain English general who boasted of his ‘feats of courage’ during the Great Mutiny (the reason for my interest in the subject should be clear), I read about the gift the rajah of Brahmapur had sent to his son before he died. The Koran had been wrapped in a shawl. The scales seemed to fall away from my eyes. Several months later Lord Littleby exhibited his collection in the Louvre. I was the most assiduous of all the visitors to that exhibition. When I finally saw my father’s shawl the meaning of the following lines was revealed to me:

And:

What else could I dream of during all those years of exile if not the clay casket that held all the wealth in the world? How many times in my dreams I saw that coarse earthen lid swing open to reveal once again, as in my distant childhood, the unearthly glow that filled the entire universe.

The treasure was mine by right - I was the legitimate heir.

The English had robbed me, but they had gained nothing by their treachery. That repulsive vulture Littleby, who prided himself on his plundered ‘rarities’, was really no better than a vulgar dealer in stolen goods. I felt not the slightest doubt that I was in the right and the only thing I feared was that I might fail in the task I had set myself.

But I made several terrible, unforgivable blunders. The first was the death of the servants, and especially of the poor children. Of course, I did not wish to kill these people, who were entirely innocent. As you have guessed, I pretended to be a doctor and injected them with tincture of morphine. I only wished to put them to sleep, but due to my inexperience and fear that the soporific would not work, I miscalculated the dose.

A shock awaited me upstairs. When I broke the glass of the display case and pressed my father’s shawl to my face with fingers trembling in reverential awe, one of the doors into the room suddenly opened and the master of the house came limping in. According to my information his Lordship was supposed to be away from home, but suddenly there he was in front of me with a pistol in his hand. I had no choice. I grabbed a statuette of Shiva and struck the English lord on the head with all my might. Instead of falling backwards, he slumped forwards, grabbing me in his arms and splashing blood onto my clothes. Under my white doctor’s coat I was wearing my dress uniform - the dark-blue sailor’s trousers with red piping are very similar to the trousers worn by the municipal medical service. I was very proud of my cunning, but in the end it was to prove my undoing. In his death throes my victim tore the Leviathan emblem off the breast of my jacket under the open white coat. I noticed that it was gone when I returned to the steamship. I managed to obtain a replacement, but I had left a fatal clue behind.

I do not remember how I left the house. I know I did not dare to go out through the door and I recall climbing the garden fence. When I recovered my wits I was standing beside the Seine. In one bloody hand, I was holding the statuette, and in the other the pistol - I have no idea why I took it. Shuddering in revulsion, I threw both of them into the water. The shawl lay in the pocket of my uniform jacket, where it warmed my heart.

The following day I learned from the newspapers that I had murdered nine other people as well as Lord Littleby. I will not describe here how I suffered because of that.

‘I should think not,’ the commissioner said with a nod. ‘This stuff is a bit too sentimental already. Anybody would think he was addressing the jury: I ask you, gentlemen, how could I have acted in any other way? In my place you would have done the same. Phooee.’ He carried on reading.

The shawl drove me insane. The magical bird with a hole instead of an eye acquired a strange power over me. It was as if I were not in control of my actions, as if I were obeying a quiet voice that would henceforth guide me in all I did.

‘There he goes building towards a plea of insanity,’ Bulldog laughed. ‘That’s an old trick, we’ve heard that one before.’

The shawl disappeared from my writing desk when we were sailing through the Suez Canal. I felt as if it had abandoned me to the whim of fate. It never even occurred to me that the shawl had been stolen. By that time I was already so deeply in thrall to its mystical influence that I thought of the shawl as a living being with a soul of its own. I was absolutely disconsolate.

The only thing that prevented me from taking my own life was the hope that the shawl would take pity on me and come back. The effort required to conceal my despair from you and my colleagues was almost more than I could manage.

And then, on the eve of our arrival in Aden, a miracle happened! When I heard Mme Kleber’s frightened cry and ran into her cabin, I saw a negro, who had appeared out of nowhere, wearing my lost shawl round his neck. Now I realize that the negro must have taken the bright-coloured piece of cloth from my cabin a few days earlier, but at the time I experienced a genuine holy terror, as if the Angel of Darkness in person had appeared from the netherworld to return my treasure to me.

In the tussle that followed I killed the black man, and while Mme Kleber was still in a faint I surreptitiously removed the shawl from the body. Since then I have always worn it on my chest, never parting with it for a moment.

I murdered Professor Sweetchild in cold blood, with a calculated deliberation that exhilarated me. I attribute my supernatural foresight and rapid reaction entirely to the magical influence of the shawl. I realized from Sweetchild’s first enigmatic words that he had solved the mystery of the shawl and picked up the trail of the rajah’s son - my trail. I had to stop the professor from talking and I did. The silk shawl was pleased with me - I could tell from the way its warmth soothed my poor tormented heart.

But by eliminating Sweetchild I had done no more than postpone the inevitable. You had me hemmed in on all sides, Commissioner. Before we reached Calcutta you, and especially your astute assistant Fandorin …